BOSTON (AP) — Harvard President Drew Faust said Wednesday that athletes should not be singled out for blame in what is believed to be the largest cheating scandal in the school's history. They are not being treated any differently in the investigation, either, she added.
"It is not about one student group," Faust said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "It's not confined to any one student group."
In her first interview on the subject since the school announced an investigation into whether as many as 125 students in a single class shared answers on a final exam, Faust said the "allegations go to the core of what is most valuable to us."
"Any kind of success and achievement is necessarily tied to the integrity of that work," she said.
Harvard announced last month that it was investigating similarities in the answers students submitted on an open-book, take-home final. Federal privacy laws prohibit the school from identifying the students or even the class, but published reports have said the class is an upper-level government class called "Introduction to Congress," and that several of the students are athletes.